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These immigrants say they've been jammed into overcrowded cells, sleeping next to toilets at federal center

The Dallas Morning News this week interviewed people held in a federal immigrant holding center, near the Tornillo tent city for migrant children, and families there reported being crammed in a 15-by-15-foot cell for up to 72 hours.

A shelter used to house unaccompanied immigrant children in Tornillo, Texas.(AP)

EL PASO - A renewed surge in Central American family migration is overwhelming private shelters and U.S. immigration holding centers here, raising new questions about the Trump administration's deterrence policies.

The Dallas Morning News this week interviewed people held in a federal immigrant holding center, near the Tornillo tent city for migrant children, and families there reported being crammed in a 15-by-15-foot cell for up to 72 hours. At least 30 people were in the cell, the immigrants said. Some slept under bathroom sinks, next to filthy toilets. One mother and her child were forced to shower together.

Another father said, "there was no privacy," but he wouldn't elaborate when asked if he had no option but to shower alongside his teenage daughter.

Federal authorities pushed back on the claims.

"We treat those in our custody with dignity and respect, and take all allegations seriously, and we investigate all formal complaints," Roger Maier, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.

ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said the three federal family detention facilities -- in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, and Berks County, Penn. -- were about two-thirds full as of last week. Collectively, the facilities can hold about 3,325, according to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office.

But independent shelter operators who take care of immigrants when they are released from federal detention facilities say they're being swamped in El Paso.

Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House -- a Catholic nonprofit that operates a network of shelters including 12 churches in West Texas and Southern New Mexico -- said the number of family members arriving has more than doubled recently to about 700 migrants per week, up from about 300 last May.

The immigrants usually arrive at night.

"We're seeing a dramatic rise in the number of refugees being released by ICE," or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Garcia. He said he believes ICE's family detention centers are at capacity.

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Families at Annunciation House on Sunday recounted their time in holding cells in the El Paso region. All asked that their faces not be shown, but gave permission to show their feet, most of them with ankle monitors.(Alfredo Corchado / The Dallas Morning News)

The private shelters, organized by Annunciation for families or single adults, are run independently and hold no government contracts. The immigrants stay there until they can find relatives to stay with or another place to go until their civil immigration cases are resolved.

"If I had space for 1,000 per week, ICE would release 1000," Garcia said. "We're over capacity. When the numbers go up, I worry about the conditions, the consequences for these families."

Heading North

It was in El Paso at Annunciation House, about 10 blocks from the international boundary, that six parents, newly released from federal detention sat next to their children, ranging from seven to 17 years of age, and on Sunday shared stories of their trip north and their time in the federal facilities.

All came from Honduras or Guatemala. They said smugglers brought them north through Chiapas, a border state state in southern Mexico, to Chihuahua, the border state across from El Paso.

All gave their names, but asked that photos be limited to their feet. Most of the adults wore ankle monitors that can track them to their destinations in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Some of the migrants travelled together from Central America. Others moved in and out of small groups, but felt alone. "I had no contact with anyone but Jesus," said Domingo Mateo, 68, from Honduras.

Once in the U.S., Mateo described U.S. border officials who ignored his plea to turn himself in for asylum.

"They pretended we weren't even there," said Mateo, adding that officials grew frustrated and short-tempered.

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Carlos Manuel Moreira, 34, traveled with his 15 year-old daughter, from Honduras "They didn't believe she was my daughter and at one point they threatened to separate us. Later they came back and said, 'She's your daughter.' I guess they checked DNA, or documents. I'm not sure."

Jose Angel Monterrosa, 43, from Guatemala, wore a long sleeve shirt with the words "Ruidoso New Mexico." His 7-year-old son wore a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt.

He recalled his exchanged with border officials:

" 'Are you a criminal?' I was asked. 'No, I'm running away from gangs who want to extort me,' I responded. "

"They made me sign some papers and I asked whether I needed a lawyer to read this, and they responded, 'We can do this the easy way, or the bad way. And why do you need a lawyer, if you're not a criminal,' " he recalled. So he signed documents that they didn't understand because the papers were in English and authorities refused to translate. Garcia believes they were probably deportation papers.

They sat in room at Annunciation House. Large mattresses were stacked against the wall, not far from a hanging portrait of the Catholic icon, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ on a crucifix.

One, Jenny Celaya, 34, a Honduran with her nine-year-old son, said she traveled with some of the others in the group who'd arrived at Annunciation House as well as two young teens who were moved to an unknown location. Inside the crowded holding cell near Tornillo, about an hour southeast of El Paso, she immediately noticed some were frightened toddlers.

"There was so much crying," Celaya recalled. "No one slept for two days. There were so many people, we couldn't walk."

At one point she recalled counting 50 people crammed inside a room with a sink and a toilet with no door for privacy.

Several immigrants said they were fed noodle soup in cups, or cold burritos, served at 4 a.m. Showers, when available, were limited to 3 minutes.

"It was so crammed," Mateo said. "I had no place to put my head, but under the sink. I slept, though I couldn't find a place to put my feet. Other people were squeezed next to a smelly toilet."

Osvaldo Pineda, 45, traveled with his 14-year-old teen daughter. "We were treated like animals, not human."

All said they had spent two or three days at one or more federal facilities and were shuffled around until they ended up the facility. "A detention camp," Pineda called it.

Celaya said when she was shuttled to the last government site, she peered out the window and saw the name: "Tornillo."

All nodded in agreement with Celaya.

Ruben Garcia, center, director of the Annunciation House in El Paso, speaks on a cell phone with a person from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Garcia said shelters in West Texas and New Mexico are filled to capacity with record number of families from Central America.(Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Garcia of Annunciation House listened as they spoke and added, "Truth is, we don't even know (exactly) where they were, but all their stories are consistent in that they were held two, three days in one place and shuffled to another place for two, three more days and then again. That's worrisome that we don't know more.

Why is this happening?

Garcia said he doesn't blame the federal agencies handling the flood of immigrants, but does blame the Trump administration's immigration policies.

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In recent years, Central Americans have fueled immigration along the border. Many mothers and fathers traveling with one or more child are seeking asylum, saying violence and poverty are the intertwining factors in pushing them north.

Zero tolerance policies announced in April by the Trump administration lead to about 2,600 children being separated from their parents.

The separations occured when adults were prosecuted and jailed under criminal law rather than the more typical civil procedures used in immigration courts.

But after the Trump administration abandoned the rigid enforcement of the family separation policy, the number of families apprehended rose by almost 40 percent in August over the previous month. Garcia believes the strain on his shelter foreshadows that September's federal migration numbers, not yet released, will be high.

It's has already been a record year for apprehensions of immigrants arriving as families. In the first 11 months, through the end of August, 90,600 immigrants travelling in a family have been detained by the Border Patrol. Those apprehensions surpass the 78,000 family members detained in 2016, when the previous record was set.

Many immigrant families attempt to voluntarily turn themselves in at U.S.-Mexico border checkpoints to legally seek asylum. But there are steady reports of more immigrants being turned away at the border ports by Customs and Border Protection staff, which often prompts families to cross illegally elsewhere at the border. Those immigrants get lumped into what the government calls "inadmissibles."

U.S. Border Patrol officers guard the fence separating US and Mexico in El Paso in 2016.(MARK RALSTON / Getty Images)

At the El Paso sector, about 11,300 immigrants -- traveling alone and in families -- attempted to cross the border during the first 11 months of this fiscal year, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That's almost an 80 percent increase in the period.

Although the immigrant families believe they were held in Tornillo, federal officials have yet to confirm that. ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa said ICE has a processing center there, but families are not to be detained there for no more than two or three hours. She also said they had no overcrowding issues.

But in addition to the ICE processing center and the tent city solely for children and teens, the border patrol also has a facility adjacent to Tornillo in Fort Hancock.

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Border facilities are "not designed to hold large groups of people," especially mothers with children, said Maier, the CBP spokesman.

"Without more specificity provided, like date, time, location of the allegations, it is impossible for CBP to respond to such generalized comments," the agency said in a statement. "CBP operates processing centers and temporary holding facilities where people are not held for more than 72 hours except in rare, extenuating circumstances. It is a priority of our agency to process and transfer all individuals in our custody to the appropriate longer-term detention agency as soon as possible."

CBP has not confirmed whether the families were there but Maier said at "all of our facilities, the meals are logged every day, the temperature is logged multiple times a day."

Most federal holdings facilities were originally designed for the most common type of immigrant: Mexican men who were often sent south of the Rio Grande within hours. But Mexican migration has plummeted for several reasons, including demographic changes and more job opportunities for Mexicans in Mexico.

In Washington, Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the federal immigration system needs an overhaul, from its asylum system to the manner in which women, men and children are now held for temporary or longer detention.

"Every part of the system is strained to or beyond capacity," said Cardinal Brown, who has worked at the Department of Homeland Security in the Bush and Obama administration.

Cardinal Brown and Garcia said seasonal spikes in migration are common, with spring being the highest, followed by fall. But the trend of seeing more families and asylum seekers, she said, is not temporary.

"This is the new normal in the southwest border," Cardenal Brown said. "We will have to come up with better process and ways for people to seek asylum. This is what we're seeing for the foreseeable future. We're not going back to the days of Mexican migration."

The children's tent camp

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Children and workers at a tent encampment recently built near the Tornillo Port of Entry on June 19, 2018, in Tornillo, Texas. The Trump administration is using the Tornillo tent facility to house immigrant children separated from their parents after they were caught entering the U.S. under the administration's zero tolerance policy. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

A short distance away from the detention center is the the Tornillo tent camp for migrant children, which is now holds about 1,600 of the more than 13,000 unaccompanied immigrant minors now in federal custody, said Ken Wolfe, a spokesman for Health and Human Services, which oversees the federal shelters and the tent camp.

The migrant children stay at the shelters until they are reunited with family members or a sponsor.

In the farming community of Tornillo, the sand-colored tents sit beyond pecan trees with large generators that supply electricity and air conditioning. The camp has recently been expanded to hold up to 3,800 children -- a fact that has alarmed many lawyers, advocates and other people.

Some advocates argue that the established network of 100 other permanent shelters for children has a higher standard of care than the temporary facility. Because the tent camp is considered temporary, the children don't, for example, have the same educational opportunities, activists and lawyers said.

Saturday and again next week, the tent camp will be the focus of more protests by immigrant advocacy groups.

Protests of both the tent camp for minors and the family conditions in the government's immigration processing centers should be alarming, said Jeremy Slack, assistant sociology and anthropology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.

"Incarcerating families and children in Tornillo is an attempt to push these policies without acknowledging their dubious legality, and the excess, unnecessary cost of detention," said Slack, who has been at many past protests.

​In a press call Thursday announcing one of the protests, Dr. Alan Shapiro, a leader in the American Academy of Pediatrics, took aim at the need for more oversight.​

"There is no clinical, scientific evidence that any amount of time of detention is ​safe ​for children," Dr. Shapiro said.

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"Highly stressful experiences can disrupt the building of a child's brain architecture. That can lead to very serious stress, known as toxic stress... and really cause short and long-term effects."

The Tornillo protests follows a damning report by the Office of the Inspector General that ​found that Trump's zero-tolerance policies on immigration announced in April were poorly planned. The report said there was a lack of coordination and communications among federal agencies' computer systems.

"Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system," the report read.

​In the press call announcing the protest, lawyer Leah Chavla of the Women's Refugee Commission said the resulting chaos is particularly "egregious" given that the zero tolerance policies that led to family separations was first tested in El Paso in 2017.

One of the two plaintiffs in the lawsuit by the ACLU that successfully challenged family separations was separated from her son in the El Paso area.

Dr. Shapiro called for independent oversight into the care of the immigrant children and criticized the difficulties advocates and attorneys have had accessing them in the past.

"The time has come for allowing independent mental and medical monitoring teams to go into the shelters, to go into the detention centers and to go into the processing centers and really be able to observe and assess and make recommendations about the care of the children," Dr. Shapiro said.

"Extreme measures like removing migrant children from foster homes and schools to put them in tent cities in Tornillo, may not be enough to dissuade migrants from coming," said Eric Olson, an expert on security and Central America at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

"Until the U.S. addresses the drivers of migration in Central America - extreme violence, desperate poverty, and ineffective governments - there is little chance the problems of irregular migration from Central America will be resolved at the U.S. border or in the Texas desert," he said.

Alfredo Corchado. Alfredo Corchado has covered U.S.-Mexico issues for The News since 1993.
A graduate of UTEP, he's also reported from Washington and Cuba. Before the News, Corchado reported at El Paso Herald-Post & The Wall Street Journal in Dallas and Philadelphia. He’s author of Midnight in Mexico and Homelands, to be published in 2018.

Dianne Solis. Dianne covers social justice issues and specializes in immigration. She's a former foreign correspondent who was based in Mexico. She has journalism degrees from Northwestern University, Cal State University, Fresno, and a Nieman fellowship from Harvard.